“You’re not going to see my mother?” she gasps. “We’ve driven all this way and you’re not even going to stop in?”

“I will, in an hour or so. I need to unwind. Besides, we didn’t drive all this way. I drove all this way,” I correct her. “And you just don’t want to go see her on your own. And you know that. I’m your buffer.”

“You are not a buffer!” she yells.

“You’re all set. Have a safe trip,” the border agent says, tapping the side of the RV. I drive away and pull my window up, but we don’t stop arguing until we are a few miles away for safe measure.

“Did that just happen?” I turn to Dorothy with a wide smile on my face. She nods, letting out a high-pitched squeal and claps her hands. She pulls out a Twix from her purse and offers to split it with me.

“No, thanks,” I say.

“It’s our celebratory candy bar!” Dorothy says. “Milk chocolate. Caramel. It’s delicious. C’mon, you know you want it.”

“It’s all yours,” I say, shaking my head.

She bites into it feverishly, picking off the little crumbs that fall on her shirt.

“Where are we going now?” I ask when her phone beeps. The drop-off location is about twenty miles north.

“What are you going to do now?” I ask after a long period of silence. “Go home to San Diego?”

“How long will the money last with the cancer treatments?” I ask.

She bites her lower lip. “A little bit but not long.”

“What are you going to do then?”

“Probably this, again,” she says, looking out in the distance. “What else is there?”

We look at the desert stretching wide before us. The sky is bright blue and the land is a dusty beige, and it’s the most beautiful place in the world.

“Will you go with me?” she asks. We’ve been lucky once.

“I can’t. This is it for me.”

“Too bad.”

“Dorothy, you’ve got to be smart about this. If you do this again, and that should be a big if, you need to go to Arizona or Texas or somewhere far away from this border.”

“Why?”

“You can’t risk getting the same agent. He won’t believe your story the second time, if you’re coming in with a different boyfriend.”

“I’ll think about it,” she says under her breath.

I want to shake her. I want to tell her not to press her luck.

What happened back there was short of a miracle and miracles don’t tend to happen in sequence.

We arrive at the drop spot a few minutes later. It’s the parking lot of a Walmart. Big, spacious, and not very full. I park in the back. We are to leave the keys in the RV, go inside, shop, and then come out.